Whole timing of it being right around the time the anti-SOPA/PIPA stuff was going down.......

Just leads me to believe that while they may have been investigating him, I think they pushed it through to happen at a specific time for the most sensationalism.

So, I am weighing the timing of events in with all of it. And finding it hard to believe that megaupload is the worst offenders they could find. I think they were the the least sympathetic they could find, with their houses and cars and general "thug life" appearance.

If they had anything at all else that wasn't like megaupload that could be used to justify their income, like Google has it's search engine and ad revenue and Youtube on the side, I think the picture of them would change.

I see a difference between Youtube and megaupload, but I don't see much of a difference in the way copyright infringement was handled. There's a website out there floating around popuppirates or something like that, where the lady narrating the videos on the site basically puts all piracy at the feet of Google. Simply because Google won't police where people choose to link adSense in, like Google would still be profitable if they actively monitored all their current users and then kept those they found violating something from creating new accounts through some magic full-proof system.

It all boils down to something that even with SOPA and PIPA is a crazy idea. Censoring the internet in it's entirety to block every possible protected works from appearing in a non-ALLOWED state.

Think about that for a second...some things are obvious non-allowed, but what about those grey area things which could include:

Trailers

Possible public domain items

Snippets of music, movies, television, books, magazines, games during the review of and/or selling of in the form of demos, chapters, etc.

Then how long of a snippet is too much of a snippet?

What about taking multiple snippets that are OK by themselves and combining them into a longer piece of the movie/book/whatever?

Covers of songs

Parodies of movies/songs/television, they should be covered....but what if they aren't parody/satiric enough?

Old games, you can't purchase anymore...aren't sold anymore, but are copyrighted. You may own a physical copy of it from your old NES but it's no longer functional or whatever. You really are infringing even though you technically own it.

Recreating or scanning for preservation old magazines/newspapers.etc Even though you may never distribute them and only use it to maintain access to that information, you are probably violating the law by media shifting. Just like you are breaking the law if you media shift a DVD/bluray to an AVI/whatever file on your computer. Even though it's quasi-allowed by law....the copyright breaking restrictions in the DMCA should make this violate the law because DVDs and such technically have "blocks" on the disc to prevent this...even if it's trivial to bypass.

Now, with all that said.....and Im sure there's many many more examples of things that people do daily that technically break the laws on the books.......let's assume we have legitimate recreations or distributions of said movie. Right now you don't have to check the validity of the person releasing it to you or the person filing DMCA against it. You just facilitate the removal/replacement and send documentation both ways to show you are complying. Sometimes it's the same business that both puts it up and orders it taken down (Viacom and youtube case a couple years back).

So...if people are complaining about this process. Let's assume you could catch every single possible version of a movie out there on the net. And see every possible version that is created every second of every day that's trying to be listed on the net. At what point do the copyright holders take precedence over the buyers rights? Am I not allowed to copy a movie into my dropbox so I can watch it while Im elsewhere? What about music, is that OK?

Now let's say that each copyright holder gets to decide on each and every instance of it's legitimacy. How can they? Information is not perfect when you have parties actively restricting access to information whether for privacy, illegal means, obfuscation, whatever. So they could essentially step into any unencrypted location and remove that file, whether it's being distributed or not because it has the possibility of being distributed.

Now consider the size of that. If people decided they were fed up with these guys telling them they can't do whatever with their movies somewhat within the grey areas of the law...media shifting, etc. They decide they will put up the movie on every single online cyberlocker they could find. They won't share the link, so they aren't in ACTUAL violation of the law. But this starts to show up in the monitoring by the copyright holder. Imagine how many requests per minute you'd have to decide on as a copyright holder. Do you think you would actually read them all, file, categorize and reach a decision on each one faster than you'd receive 10 more?

Now.....copyright holders are expecting Google and other online presences to do that for them. Because they have some mystical knowledge of each side of the equation. That the person putting it up has no rights to it, and the person taking it down has every right to it. Shared or not, incorrectly labelled or not, etc etc.

They are putting a very simple face on a crazy difficult problem, especially when people on both sides of the selling and buying equation should have rights to the media to some extent. And only one side of it is being represented in the news and in the laws.

And how this all applies to megaupload? They found a way to make money on that problem, and people are pissed that they didn't get a cut. It's just not possible that those handful of guys put that much raw data on their own site. And so I don't think they are as guilty as they are painted to be, because following DMCA requests is all they are required to do.....Google does it in a similar manner. Remove the specific incidents indicated in the paperwork, no more, no less. In real life terms, Megaupload was used by copyright infringers to make money by getting 1000 hits to their listed files....megaupload made money on the ads. However, you could say that megaupload could also be used by legitimate people with a short story or something else to host it and make a few bucks off of it, and it probably was.....at least once. They'd have to have the income of Google and a army of monkeys to monitor and decide on each and every file that got listed daily. But they seemed to be following the law, even if their site was used by copyright infringers. Youtube seems to be following the law, and they get videos put up and taken down all the time.....so it's obviously being used by copyright infringers (arguably some are just BS takedowns).

Saying things like "abuse of power" means that later they can bring a case against these guys and use this as example of how they don't actively prevent piracy. And therefore owe the MPAA something in return for the piracy they facilitate by downplaying, etc etc.

It's the idea of who can take the most preposterous stance ends up with this weird "It must be true!" mindset that clings to it. Government "terrorist hunters" and many others thrive on it for their funding and support.

Insanity seems to be the flavor of the kool-aid for most policies and laws now-a-days.

Just another reason to pre-order from Steam at the MSRP. Been watching that stuff for awhile, and most games only get 5-10 dollars off on other platforms on pre-orders. Then the price usually drops off some in the first 1-2 months on a sale through Steam...if you want to have it on Steam.

Or if it's steamworks.....you can order elsewhere for cheaper if you want it. Just won't get the TF2 items.

I honestly don't see any harm in it. Encourages interest from TF2 players in other people's games...and vice versa.

jdreyer wrote on Jan 17, 2012, 21:58:Is there a lot of crossover between Kingdoms of Amalur and TF2 players?

Mordhaus wrote on Jan 13, 2012, 23:26:Really, so you support plagiarism, copyright or patent theft, and you feel that you cannot put a price on intellectual capital?

As I said previously, you can rationalize it to yourself however you like; but in making that copy you took something that wasn't yours and that you did not pay for in any way, for your own use. You didn't create it, you copied the creation of someone else without reimbursing them for the effort they put into it. It doesn't matter if you would have bought it in the first place or not, you took something that didn't belong to you. Taking something that doesn't belong to you is...?

To get a little pedantic about it, you could take something from patent designs and make it to their spec. Unless something has changed, you would not be in violation of the law unless you tried to sell it or profit from it.

There's nothing stopping you from recreating each individual piece inside your vehicle...which are based on patent designs. Cost might be limiting you from doing so. But it was one of the ideas behind patents and such that you could reverse engineer something and try to find better ways to do something and patent it.

Now, they have all the clauses that supposedly prevent you from unlocking your phones or reprogramming your Xbox to have more functionality that intended. Especially if you sell them after unlocking/modifying them.

So I don't agree that not paying the original designer of a product that you could just make one yourself that ended up better or cheaper than buying off the shelf is against the law or requires rationalization.

Now applying it to books, media, etc. I agree that they should be afforded protection and copying them is easier and much cheaper than say making a replica of a vehicle. But changing it's format should not be considered a different product. IE, If I have a DVD of a movie and I want a ripped version on my computer....I should be able to do that. But right not, by law, you have violated the DVD copyright protection measures in doing that....they even took software down that allowed you to do this although I don't recall the name of it. So you've broken the law, even though you should be entirely within your rights to transfer the product you own to a different format for consumption by yourself.

Same goes for sitting down and typing an copying a book you own and making an ebook. They would probably try to bust your ass for this, even though technically you should be able to media shift it. They just wouldn't believe that you did that on your own....even if you had the software/hardware setup to automate it. They would probably be able to successfully get you for copyright infringement, even though you never sold it or let anyone see it (even if they did own copies, you'd still be in trouble).

It's just a crazy situation having to pay multiple times for the same thing. And the "digital" version of things being more expensive than the non-digital and less restricted versions of them. Digital right now = costs more. When it should be costs less and sell more. Individual authors are catching onto that, the big publishers are not.....and it's in their best interest to sell high because they keep an absorbent fee something like 75-90% of the book price whether it's digital or paper.

I imagine it's much the same for the game publishing houses....and it's certainly so for the movie industry where nothing ever makes money despite all the money it brings in.

Jonny wrote on Jan 13, 2012, 04:51:While I enjoy TOR's leveling reasonably well, it's a Bioware singleplayer game with other people running around, the game at 50 is a huge turn around to anyone who isn't a traditional MMO fan.

Instances, raids or PvP. Ooh! And we're adding more instances and more raids and more PvP!

It's a bit of a bugger, they've copied vanilla WoW so heavily that they've just copied it's Raid or Die endgame as well. Even if you enjoy a bit of PvP like I do that just leaves you with endless warzone grinding or Ilum, a planet distilled from pure tedium.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but Rift with it's solo dungeons, MoP upcoming with it's trinity less skirmishes and Pokemon or GW2 are all expanding what they offer for people to do at endgame. I'd have thought that given their focus on casual MMO players and singleplayer RPG fans TOR would have been at the forefront of that kind of shift, not several years behind it.

Companions......the future!

Actually companions are replacements for the mechanic they used to advertise where people could switch out their roles and become healers/tanks at the push of a button. So you gain a companion but lose the ability to supplement your abilities while in groups....ends up making you weaker than when you are solo.

So I suspect that in the future they will make companions available when you are in a full group.. probably after an expansion.

Games could use a little more frivolity when it comes to their development and experience.

Games and "super strictness" don't seem to mesh well together.

That is not to say that you shouldn't make money off your game, but balance that expectation against the fact that you are MAKING A GAME.

Hell some car manufacturers encourage people to have more fun with a thing that could be used to mow down a crowd of people than game developers do with their games. Game devs try to lock every aspect of it down and then yell at you some more after it's released just for good measure.

Games have become this kind of weird abusive relationship, where you are supposed to hand over you money whenever they release something and then take all the accusations and product problems with a smile on your face.....or else.

The people who are really good at games tend to get so by going up against people who are also really good at the game most of the time they play. Their scores should not be outlandish against these people (and therefore their overalls shouldn't be crazy high), and if they are found to be spending lots of time in random "pub" servers I believe their "Im just good" explanation less.

This is especially true for those people who spend a lot of time on foot, vehicles have been more about finding a sweet spot or hard to beat grounds and demolishing people there. Even so, outlandish scores in vehicles are evident......since you'd have to be nuts to continue to walk into this guy's "believable" kill zone. So he's either using something to get outrageous kills or he's just utterly ruining the game experience of a lot of other people.

Which, cheating or not, if you got a guy whose ruining the game experience for 100+ other people...he may not deserve a ban from game but it would be nice if whatever he is doing to grief is stopped. Whether it be an exploit or him having 2-3 friends prop him up.

Wowbagger_TIP wrote on Jan 1, 2012, 19:47:Anyone want to trade me a piece of coal for a game? Can get me the trade achievement and maybe a game that i don't already have. I have a few things available to trade:

I'd take oddworld, got 3 coals...want to keep at least 1 so I got an entry in the drawing. I got so many coupons, Im sure they will all rot unless they do some kind of weird sale and coupons stack on top.

Not a fan of games that don't ban people who obviously cheating...wow is pretty bad about letting it go on for months.

But also not a fan of games that ban for things you are capable of doing in the game that may be unintended or overlooked but still capable of doing them. Especially if they do not warn you IN GAME about it. Having to read forums and emails to find out you are walking on the wrong path and they'd prefer you use the other is not a good way to do things.

Veterator wrote on Jan 1, 2012, 02:52:Yes you are right, no one should ever do anything to correct the cases of abuse. It's the path to ruin. Ignoring it makes it much better.

Domestic abuse? Police should beat the wife some more, because the husband obviously knows something we don't know...if he wasn't beating her she might become a female hitler.

Pedophilia? Those children asked for it, you don't know it's speculation to assume they didn't.

Animal abuse? Those dogs were probably going to bite someone someday, so better to make them live in their own filth and fight for our amusement.

The people who stop these things are not "good guys", and it's obviously not what the world needs.....space captain has told you. So fuck it.

oh yeh, what was i thinking?? this "PAX vs PR dept" shit is exactly like domestic abuse and pedophilia!

your absolutist stance is only an inability to comprehend reality, not some kind of "discerning wisdom".. that takes something you aint got

Ignoring abuse is ignoring abuse. Once you stop ignoring it, then you fit the punishment to the crime.

This guy hasn't been jailed for his abuse, but lost his job (as Im sure is commonplace when someone fails to perform their job to satisfaction of the employer/business partner) and had some public humiliation (which I don't think he quite considers humiliation but advertising). He may end up jailed for blackmail and holding digital property from it's rightful owners, but that's just another poor decision on his part.

The rest of it was sarcasm on the speculation. And blindly ignoring his history of abusing other customers, which he backpedaled on when brought to the public's attention. His decisions were his own, and if he hadn't acted as such there would be nothing to cause public outrage. Bottom line is, he didn't learn from his mistakes in past..continued to repeat them and I still don't think he's learned.

Arguing that it's commonplace in the business world doesn't magically make it right...if you want to get into inability to comprehend reality and "discerning wisdom". For that matter, sexual harassment was commonplace in the business world, and they have laws governing it now. Does that mean sexual harassment was OK since it was technically legal in the past?

And before we go through the apples and oranges argument. Sexual harassment can be JUST words, much like berating a customer through email is JUST words. You should show me some skin, and you know your boss will take my word over yours because I know the CEO of the company, the mayor of Boston, the Yellow Power Ranger, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Mike Krahulik.

Veterator wrote on Jan 1, 2012, 02:52:Yes you are right, no one should ever do anything to correct the cases of abuse. It's the path to ruin. Ignoring it makes it much better.

...

The people who stop these things are not "good guys", and it's obviously not what the world needs.....space captain has told you. So fuck it.

What are you prattling on about? Because I don't think I've read anything quite so stupid since the original email by captain elroid douchebag himself over this entire affair. It's always fun to see someone try to take something and make it into the grandest ideological battle of the century, instead of what a person is. Damn PCness run amok, I mean we'd better not hurt the roiders feelings. He might cry in a fit of vein popping rage or something.

space captain wrote on Jan 1, 2012, 01:24:maybe the whole company is a piece of shit, and now they are gonna be around longer because they've appeased people by firing this asshole.. and will be able to scam more people out of there money, etc. so its actually a BAD thing he got fired instead of taking the whole place down with him

who knows.. you can play the speculative angle all day long, it doesnt impress me or "justify" anything for me.. its guesswork

in general, if the world ran "the way it should" then everything would be a utopia and we would all ride unicorns across rainbow bridges to gumdrop fields and so on.. but its not, so there is way more than enough "shoulda woulda coulda" to go around.. this shit is ridiculously petty in a comparative sense, its commonplace, and the entire business world is basically a fucking cesspool of "wrongful" actions... people just approve of it when its "legal" or "politically correct"

so fuck it, go ahead and go berzerker on this fool and then pat yourself on the back for being a "good guy", its just what we need, let me tell you

Yes you are right, no one should ever do anything to correct the cases of abuse. It's the path to ruin. Ignoring it makes it much better.

Domestic abuse? Police should beat the wife some more, because the husband obviously knows something we don't know...if he wasn't beating her she might become a female hitler.

Pedophilia? Those children asked for it, you don't know it's speculation to assume they didn't.

Animal abuse? Those dogs were probably going to bite someone someday, so better to make them live in their own filth and fight for our amusement.

The people who stop these things are not "good guys", and it's obviously not what the world needs.....space captain has told you. So fuck it.

Jerykk wrote on Dec 31, 2011, 22:10:Christoforo was doing his job poorly and that was brought to light, resulting in him being fired. Had Krahulik not gotten involved, that probably wouldn't have happened.

thanks for the prophecy ms cleo, but thats pure speculation when you get down to it

none of it "really matters" its just another day on the OMG!! EPIC FAIL! LULZ! just sayin.. internet

Actually there's been a website floating around for a year where Christoforo did something very similar to here to someone else...they just never linked it to PA. So he spent the rest of that time berating how many other customers until Dave included Krahulik in on the conversation.

I think the guy would still be raging out on people whose money he was holding right now if it hadn't been for PA.

He has updated, the original stuff is at the bottom of the site. You'll note Christoforo reversed his attitude when the guy posted all the stuff up for the public to see, but it never got picked up by the big outfits.

Wish sites would stop driving traffic to articles like that. Because agree with it or not, you are supporting them to continue taking arguments and making completely pointless articles that skew everything beyond a reasonable argument.

If Kotaku saw that their more moderate, factual and genuine less crazily developed "opinion" pages got more hits than ones like this...they'd hopefully stop employing people whose job it is to make frivolous arguments for the sole purpose of page views.

It comes down to the Christoforos being responsible for his actions. If he had not written that stuff and responded in that manner, no one would be up in arms over this. But he did, and he got called out on it....and then he continued to blame everyone else for his choices.

And on top of it all, he holds what digital resources he has hostage AFTER he has already pissed off a whole lot of people. I mean the guy is an idiot, and he only backs down when he's dragged into the light and gets negative attention for it. If you can't be reasonable until a whole fucking load of people tell you that you're asshole and treat you poorly because of it, well that's just how people have to deal with you then each time you act like that....some public humiliation and backlash.

And to top it all off, he claims his kids and wife are being harmed by this and it's everyone's fault. And he CONTINUES to a dirt bag resulting in even more scorn being thrown his way and in turn his family. At this point, there is no reasonable person who is going to say this guy did not bring this whole thing down upon his head at least three times over.

Plus being one of the first and having charities associated with it gives it a higher profile. But yes I think their game selection AND them giving out extra stuff each bundle keeps people coming back including the previous bundle and what not.